Let's now turn to cognitive therapies as another modality that is used in the treatment of psychological disorders. If you take a moment to reflect on this, how you think of any given situation ultimately is really what determines how we feel, according to the cognitive theorists. So it's not a situation itself that causes you to feel good or bad, but it's... it's how you interpret that situation that yields you feeling good or bad. So I've used the example before in this series about a roller coaster.
So I might go to a roller coaster and I might look at that roller coaster and be really excited and want to go on it because I've interpreted the roller coaster as being fun, whereas my friend might say, no, that's not for me. I'm going to avoid that at all costs. It's not the roller coaster itself that is causing me to be fearful, but it's my interpretation of that roller coaster that is making me feel the way I feel and act the way that I do. And based on this theory, changing a person's or adjusting a person's dysfunctional thoughts, and by dysfunctional we mean those types of thoughts that don't allow us to function at our optimal level, is what will yield a reduction in my distress, or my anxiety, or my depression, or my anger.
So it's about adjusting and adapting my dysfunctional thinking that helps me shift ultimately how I behave and how I feel. The theory goes that we experience cognitive distortions. Distortions of situations based on these misinterpretations.
So some examples of a cognitive distortion might be all or nothing thinking. When a person engages in all or nothing thinking, they may say to themselves, there's no way I'm gonna pass my exam. It's impossible. I shouldn't even study at all because there's no way I'm gonna pass. And so that's an all or nothing thinking.
It's all, either I am going to pass or I'm not going to pass. There's no in between. There's no, I can get a 70 or I can get an 80. Either I have to get a 100 or a 90 or an above or nothing. Another example of a type of distortion is thought reading. When I look at a person and I say, oh, I know that that person.
I know that they're not interested in me. I know that they don't like me as a friend. They probably think that I aren't fun and I'm not fun to be around.
Did they ever tell you that? Have you heard that directly? Do you have direct evidence of it? Because if not, you're engaging in thought reading, which is not necessarily realistic.
It may be a cognitive distortion. And so the approach applies a method of finding more realistic ways of examining our thoughts. our own thoughts. So we would ask ourselves, what is the evidence that I have in support of this thought that I keep thinking about?
I'm never going to get into the college of my choice. What evidence do you have that you'll never get into college of your choice? Do you know anybody that didn't have the high GPA that the college expected, but yet still got in? If so, that's evidence that people can get in, even if they aren't set up perfectly to get into that college yet?
What evidence do you have maybe that you'll be okay even if you don't get into that college? How do you know that you'll still be able to survive, that it's not an all or nothing scenario where your life is doomed and the world is not worth engaging in anymore? So that's some of the methods that the cognitive approach utilizes.
Very heavily supported in the research. And... For anyone who may be dealing with anxiety or depressive disorders in particular, the cognitive model, or now it's called the CBT, more commonly the cognitive behavioral model, which combines what we spoke about in the previous sub-module with these notions that we spoke about here into a therapy called cognitive behavior therapy, very commonly used for those conditions. Alright, that about covers it. We'll have one more subtopic and that'll wrap up this module.
See you then.